Nuclear Power Likely to Grow by Getting Smaller

Test engineer Jacob Wilcox pulls his arm out of a glove box used for processing sodium at TerraPower, a company developing and building small nuclear reactors on Jan. 13, 2022, in Everett, Wash. AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File

In the midst of growing demand for low-carbon base-load electricity, nuclear power is increasingly regarded as a clean, reliable option, but multi-year regulatory approval processes, a dearth of capital, and chronic cost overruns when constructing new plants have made utilities reluctant to build.

Many in the nuclear power industry say one way to address these issues is to make reactors smaller.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) are nuclear reactors assembled from pre-manufactured components that have a power capacity of 300 megawatts or less. They are designed to be cheaper and more flexible than larger-scale nuclear power plants, with enhanced safety features such as automatic shut-down technology.

By contrast to most existing nuclear reactors, which are uniquely designed for each site, SMRs offer the potential to expedite regulatory approvals and construction time, bringing costs down substantially.

“They bring more regulatory certainty and an ability to get through that process much more quickly,” Todd Abrajano, CEO of the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council, an industry advocacy group, told The Epoch Times.

“The fact that these designs can be modular, that most of the construction can be done in-house, in a factory, and then assembled at the site, requires much less work and much less bespoke design.”

According to the Department of Energy (DOE), because SMRs are smaller, they require less capital to build and can be sited in locations that are not possible for larger nuclear plants.

“Accordingly, the Department has provided substantial support to the development of light water-cooled SMRs, which are under licensing review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and will likely be deployed in the late 2020s to early 2030s,” the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy stated.

Designers of SMRs say they are also safer than traditional nuclear plants, including features such as passive safety systems that automatically shut off in case of an emergency, without the need for human intervention or electricity.

“Our design does not require connection to a grid, which means that in the event of a power outage or similar situation, the plant can continue to operate safely and efficiently on its own,” Clayton Scott, chief commercial officer of NuScale, a designer of SMRs, told The Epoch Times.

The emergency planning zone approved by the NRC for NuScale plants extends only to the site boundary of the plant, compared with the 10-mile radius that is required for traditional nuclear reactors, he said.

While Russia and China have taken the lead as the only countries currently operating SMRs, western nations are racing to catch up, envisioning huge new markets for both domestic energy production and exports. Today, there are more than 80 SMR designs in development across 19 countries, including the United States, the UK, Canada, Japan, and South Korea, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A report by Natural Resources Canada projects that the global market for SMRs could exceed $150 billion by 2040. According to Valuates, a market analytics firm, the global market for SMRs was $4.13 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $10.23 billion by 2030, an annual growth rate of about 14 percent.

In March 2023, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy announced that its SMR model BWRX-300 had “achieved a significant pre-licensing milestone” toward regulatory approval in Canada and that deployment of the model is in various stages of planning or contracting in Estonia, Poland, and the United States.

Private Companies, Military Want SMRs

While power generation has, to date, been the domain of electric utilities, SMRs may also see demand from private companies.

Increasingly, tech companies are signing contracts to ensure a steady, reliable supply of electricity, and they are often choosing nuclear energy as that source.

In September, Microsoft inked a deal with Constellation Energy to restart the Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which famously shut down its Unit 2 reactor after an operating accident in 1979.

This reactor will provide power exclusively to Microsoft for the next 20 years. And while Three Mile Island uses standard-size reactors, other tech companies are looking to SMRs to power their data centers, including Amazon and Google.

Oil and gas companies, steel companies, and chemical companies are also potential customers. In March 2023, Dow and X-energy signed a joint development agreement to install an SMR at the company’s Seadrift industrial site in Texas.

SMRs are the ideal choice for companies that want a smaller, dedicated power source on-site instead of being dependent on the electric grid. However, these companies typically lack the expertise to operate plants, and they don’t want to take responsibility for waste disposal or assume the liability that comes with owning a nuclear reactor.

“The one thing I’m consistently hearing from industrial application end users is that they don’t want to own and operate a nuclear plant,” Abrajano said. “So there’s going to have to be a utility that’s running these, or there are a number of other companies that are now starting to pop up which are pure-play development companies that are looking to find sites and find customers, and then they will either own and operate those reactors and do long-term power purchase agreements or figure out another way to bring these things online going through a utility.”

In order to address this issue, NuScale has partnered with an operator called ENTRA1 Energy, which builds, finances, owns, and operates the plants that are designed by NuScale.

“This innovative approach allows potential clients, including data centers, utilities, and hydrogen production plants, to access reliable power solutions without the complexities of developing or owning a nuclear facility,” Scott said.

The military is another market for SMRs.

A White House fact sheet issued on May 29 reads, “Small modular nuclear reactors and microreactors can provide defense installations resilient energy for several years amid the threat of physical or cyberattacks, extreme weather, pandemic biothreats, and other emerging challenges that can all disrupt commercial energy networks.”

While SMRs can be used to provide uninterrupted power to large military bases, microreactors can power forward operating bases. Microreactors are currently in use for submarines and aircraft carriers and can be transported in a semitrailer truck.

“When you think in terms of the size of a nuclear reactor, most people don’t think, as they’re driving down the highway, that they could be driving past a reactor that could be operational, but certainly that’s the case,” Abrajano said.

The portability of SMRs and microreactors means that they could be transported to natural disaster sites that have lost power. While the grid is being restored, smaller reactors can power essential facilities such as hospitals and grocery stores.

Regarding regulatory approvals, the nuclear power industry anticipates a faster process because of a new bipartisan consensus, as the left regards nuclear as a low-carbon energy source and conservatives see it as a means of providing continuous base-load power to meet the escalating demand for electricity.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been supportive of nuclear power, and Congress has recently thrown its support behind the industry as well.

Streamlining Approval Process

In July, the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act was signed into law and is designed to streamline the approval process at the NRC for new nuclear plants. Two issues that have plagued the nuclear power industry are the multi-year process of getting regulatory approvals and construction that chronically exceeds budget and deadlines once approvals are in place.

Among the few recent nuclear reactors to be built in the United States, Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia began commercial operations in July 2023 and April 2024, respectively. These reactors, designed by Westinghouse, were built with modules manufactured off-site and then assembled on-site but were completed seven years behind schedule and went $17 billion over budget.

Together with Units 1 and 2, they compose the largest nuclear power plant operating in the United States and provide a highly dense, reliable, and carbon-free energy source. By comparison, a wind farm that could produce the same amount of energy as Plant Vogtle would cover an area of more than 1,000 square miles, with a capacity factor—the amount of electricity it actually produces as a fraction of its installed capacity—of about one-third that of a nuclear power plant, because of its weather dependence.

According to Abrajano, the average time for the NRC to approve new nuclear plants has been about five years, but he estimates that, with the passage of the ADVANCE Act, regulatory approvals could be completed within 24 months. New, modular designs are already getting fast-tracked approvals.

In December 2023, a modular plant built by Kairos Power in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, received regulatory approval in a little more than two years. That plant, called Hermes, is a low-power reactor that is expected to be operational by 2027.

As the nuclear power industry gears up to bring this new technology to market at scale, it is also assessing whether it still has the physical infrastructure and the human talent it needs, particularly given that the United States has built few new nuclear plants in the past 50 years. Despite initial ambitions in the 1970s to build as many as a thousand nuclear plants across the United States, only 54 plants, containing 94 nuclear reactors, are currently in operation, with an average age of 42 years.

By contrast, China has been aggressively moving forward in building out its nuclear fleet.

Over the past decade, China added more than 34 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity. It now has 55 operating reactors, with 23 additional reactors under construction, according to a report by the Energy Information Administration.

“The United States has the largest nuclear fleet, with 94 reactors, but it took nearly 40 years to add the same nuclear power capacity as China added in 10 years,” the report reads.

Does the US Have the Resources to Manufacture?

U.S. industry insiders say that, with so much manufacturing, including key energy infrastructure components such as transformers, largely existing outside the United States, the nuclear industry currently lacks the resources it needs to produce at scale. Of the top 10 transformer manufacturers, General Electric is the only one that is based in the United States.

“We still have a lot of manufacturing as it relates to work done at SpaceX, and I would say we still produce a lot in terms of engine manufacturing,” Juliann Edwards, chief development officer of The Nuclear Company, told The Epoch Times. “And you see an increase of grant money coming out of the Department of Energy to serve universities as they invest more into nuclear engineering and the surrounding engineering functional areas, like materials and chemical and mechanical.”

The Nuclear Company plans to build nuclear plants according to a “fleet-scale model [that] combines using proven, licensed technology and a design-once, build-many approach,” the company stated.

According to the U.S. News 2024 university rankings, the top-rated schools for nuclear engineering are the University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, the University of Illinois, the University of Tennessee, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

For younger students, the American Nuclear Society has established several K–12 programs to educate grade school students and teachers about opportunities in the nuclear energy field. This includes a science curriculum called “Navigating Nuclear” and a “Nuclear Ambassadors” program to bring nuclear professionals into schools for classroom discussions.

“We have a foundation, but we’re behind right now and we’ve got to onshore a lot of the capabilities that we’ve lost,” Edwards said.